I’ve been feeling somewhat drained the past week. I’m not sure why. This past weekend I went to my cousin’s wedding down in North Carolina. I was looking forward to it because I wanted to get my wedding count up. I think I’m one of the few young people who’ve been to more funerals than weddings. It was a Jewish wedding too, so I figured it’d be interesting. In the end it was ok, I’m not much of a social butterfly so it was weird not knowing anyone except my cousin, his mom, and my mom. And though I think my cousin is making a good choice, I think a lot of people rush into marriage. I still remember a friend of mine lecturing me about how “when you know, you know”, and then later in the conversation confessing to me that they weren’t sure if they really loved their fiance. How can you be sure you’ve found the one, but not sure you love them? I think a decent number of people get worried about not finding someone and then end up making a poor choice (Also, Noah, if for some reason you ever happen to read this, no, this story is not about your fiancee). Anyways…

Radiohead – In Rainbows

I don’t normally tout new music releases, but this music is ONLINE and FREE and by my favorite band so I figured it’d make sense to mention it here. Radiohead are trying a new experiment where they’re putting their music online and you can pay whatever you want for it. I recommend downloading it for free to see if you like it, and then if you do, go back and buy it. It’s honestly their best record since OK Computer. The song that sticks out most to me is “Videotape”, it’s by far the most beautiful song I’ve heard this year.

WikiBooks

My thesis: Programming books are becoming obsolete. Nobody seems to learn languages via books anyway. Even the smartest programmers I talk to seem to pick up things from reading various articles or through reading documentation while chugging through a new programming project. I picked up a book on PHP a couple months back, and I found myself wishing I could jump around to different topics. I could easily look up each interesting idea in the book’s index, but that’s kind of a pain in the butt. Plus I’d like to be able to interactively test examples as I come to them. That’s when the idea hit me: Why not make wikibooks? Of course, like any good idea, I figured someone had to have already implemented it, and after some googling, here’s what I found:

Wikibooks: Programming Languages Bookshelf

That’s it?

There was more to “dump”, but it’s late and I need to get to bed.